Geistliche Lieder und Psalmen, 1567, was compiled and published by Johann Leisentrit, a Roman Catholic priest who from 1559 to the time of his death in 1586, was Dean at the Cathedral of St. Peter's in Bautzen, a town in southeastern Germany. His hymnbook appeared in three complete editions (1567, 1573, 1584), and in abridged editions in 1575, 1576, and 1589. By adapting the vernacular hymn, a genre created by Protestant reformers, Leisentrit hoped to bring back to the "true church" (wahrglaubiger Christlicher Kirchen) those who had defected to Lutheranism. This was a formidable ambition because his diocese was located adjacent to the Moravian-Bohemian regions where the Protestant movement was born and remained vital. Containing approximately 260 texts set to 175 notated melodies, many borrowed from Protestant sources and adapted to serve Roman Catholic objectives, Leisentrit's book was the second Catholic hymnbook to be published in the sixteenth century. It surpassed its Protestant and Catholic precursors in scope and provided a model for the profusion of hymnbooks of numerous confessions that appeared in Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries . Wetzel and Heitmeyer present their study in two parts: The first comprises six contextual chapters that survey earlier German achievements in hymnody, provide analyses of the texts and music in Leisentrit's book, and assess his achievement within the volatile environment of the Counter Reformation. The second gives the melodies in modern notation along with the first stanzas of the texts; provides detailed concordances and references to sources that identify textual and musical provenances; and concludes with six appendixes to facilitate scholarly cross-references. Fourteen of the seventy wood engravings from Leisentrit's book, many of which are visual representations of the prevailing confessional conflicts, are given in enlarged reproductions. The authors provide the only comprehensive study in English of a unique religious figure and his efforts to achieve confessional reconciliation in the decades following the Council of Trent. They add to a more accurate interpretation of the relationship between Lutherans and Catholics in the sixteenth century and support the hypothesis that some Lutherans remained more liturgically formal than their Catholic contemporaries.

In life he was larger than life. He made an immediate and memorable impact on those he met and with whom he worked. He was incredibly industrious in all his teaching, speaking, lecturing, composing, and above all in his writing. In the time others would take to think through the possibility of authoring a book, Erik would have gone to his longsuffering and slightly dyslexic typewriter and completed the manuscript. Gathering with his family at Westminster Abbey for his memorial service, the idea of a random collection of essays or a series of personal anecdotes was discarded by the editors. To appropriately honor this substantial life, something more systematic was required. Thus the idea for this volume was born. Each of the contributors, who has benefited in some way from his friendship, teaching and writing, has examined an area or a subject in which Erik Rowley has made his mark. Significantly, it has taken seventeen authors to cover some of the ground where his footprints are still fresh and the clarity of his voice still rings.

This first volume of a two volume edition contains letters written between 1727 and 1756 by the famous hymn writer, poet, and co-founder of Methodism, Charles Wesley (1707-1788), Volume 2 will contain letters written between 1757 and 1788. The edition brings together texts which are located in libraries and archives from across the globe and here presents them as a complete collection for the first time - many of the letters have never been previously published. The appended notes help the reader locate the letters in their proper historical and literary context and provide full information regarding the location of the original source and, where possible, something of its provenance.
These texts provide an intimate glimpse into the world of early Methodism and Charles' own struggles and triumphs as a central figure within it. They collectively document the story of Charles Wesley's early experiences as he sought to find his own place in Methodism and, of key importance for Charles, Methodism's place in the wider purposes of God. Here are letters of a theological kind, letters that reflect on his experiences as an itinerant preacher, letters that show something of his rather unsettled personality and letters that relate to his own personal and domestic circumstances. Here we see something of the inner workings of a nascent religious group. These are not sanitised accounts written by those looking back, but first-hand accounts written from the heart of a lived experience.
While this book will naturally appeal to those who have a specialist interest in the early history of Methodism, for others there is much to be gained from the picture it gives of the wider eighteenth-century world in which Charles and his co-religionists worked and lived.

Designed for general readers and scholars, this study explores the Lutheran commentary in Bach's St. John Passion and suggests that fostering hostility to Jews is not its subject or purpose. Also included are a literal, annotated translation of the libretto and an appendix discussing anti-Judaism and Bach's other works.

Since Britten's death in 1976, numerous articles and books have been written about his life and work. Much has been made of the strong influences of his pacifism and his homosexuality. It is often suggested that Britten felt himself to be an outsider from 'normal' society, and that this accounts for the his concern to portray the 'outsider' in his operas. There is no doubt that this is an important aspect of Britten's art, but the present work attempts to show that his music embraces much wider and more universal concerns, and in addressing those concerns there is a clearly defined pattern of spiritual influence. Part One of the book examines Britten's early life, and the strong presence which the Church had in his childhood and adolescence. It explores the way in which certain spiritual influences were first manifested, and how, like the more specifically musical 'themes' which Donald Mitchell has noted, they can be traced throughout Britten's life and work. The author was privileged to have conversations with two clergymen who were influential in Britten's life, as well as gathering valuable insights through a long series of conversations with Sir Peter Pears. Part Two examines a wide range of the composer's music in which a spiritual dimension can be traced. The specifically liturgical music has received rather less critical notice than Britten's larger works. The music is discussed here, and shown to possess musical characteristics in common with the larger works. Britten could not be described as a conventional Christian; still less is it true to describe him, as Eric Walter White has done, as 'keen, wherever possible, to work within the framework of the Church of England'. Nevertheless, his spirituality was rooted in the religious experience of his childhood. This book seeks to demonstrate that Britten retained a sense of the Christian values absorbed in childhood and adolescence, and that these - along with the specifically Christian heritage of plainsong - were strongly influential in his choice and treatment of themes.

For all that has been written about Renaissance Florence we know relatively little about its musical life, its religious life, and the aspirations of its average citizens. This book contributes significantly to all understanding of all of these by documenting and interpreting the corporate patronage of an important Florentine musical repertory over a period of some 200 years. From the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries at least twelve lay confraternities sponsored a widespread musical activity involving a specialized network of singers and instrumentalists. The meticulous records kept by these companies reveal a wealth of information about the musicians' conditions and patterns of activity, the central role of music in the companies' vernacular liturgy (especially as conditioned by bequests), and vital performance practice issues such as the role of instruments in vocal performance, the shift from monophonic to polyphonic practice, and the interaction of written and unwritten musical traditions. Because the companies were, in many respects, both a microcosm and characteristic manifestation of this remarkable Renaissance city, the author also seeks to explain how mendicant spirituality, guild society, and devotional images and imagination provide the essential context for understanding the function and significance of laudesi practice and repertoire. This book well be welcomed not only by musicologists, but by Italianists and late medieval and early modern scholars in general.

In Artistic Disobedience Claudio Bacciagaluppi shows how music practice was an occasion for cross-confessional contacts in 17th- and 18th-century Switzerland, implying religious toleration. The difference between public and private performing contexts, each with a distinct repertoire, appears to be of paramount importance. Confessional barriers were overcome in an individual, private perspective. Converted musicians provide striking examples. Also, book trade was often cross-confessional. Music by Catholic (but also Lutheran) composers was diffused in Reformed territories mainly in the private music societies of Swiss German towns (collegia musica). The political and pietist influences in the Zurich and Winterthur music societies encouraged forms of communication that are among the acknowledged common roots of European Enlightenment.

Agostino Agazzari (c. 1580-c. 1642) has long been recognized as one of the most prominent theorists of the early Baroque. The enduring fame of his 1607 treatise on the basso continuo has, however, overshadowed his equally significant contributions as a composer. And for all his renown, relatively little has been written about his professional career in Siena. This book not only provides the first comprehensive study of his life and sacred works, it also opens a window on musical culture in Siena during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Through the use of archival materials, the author documents Agazzari's long association with the Sienese Cathedral and furnishes valuable information on the personnel, repertory, and performance practices there. She argues for a reassessment of the influences that shaped the composer's style and challenges the generally held view that Sienese culture stagnated after the fall of the Republic in 1555. The book contributes significantly to our knowledge of musical life in the Tuscan 'City of the Virgin'.

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Over 200 hymns (arranged by topic with four-part harmony and guitar chords) are included in this work. Includes several indexes, including scripture references and composers and sources clearly organized.

What did nuns sing? How did they learn about music? How did the music affect their piety? This book answers these and many other questions about the musical life in English nunneries in the later Middle Ages. Drawing upon a wide range of historical sources, Yardley pieces together a mosaic of nunnery musical life. Formal monastic rules, medieval liturgical manuscripts, records from bishops' visitations to nunneries and other medieval documents provide evidence that even the smallest convents sang the monastic offices on a daily basis and that many of the larger houses celebrated the late medieval liturgy in all of its complexity.

In Thresholds Marcel Cobussen rethinks the relationship between music and spirituality. The point of departure is the current movement within contemporary classical music known as New Spiritual Music, with as its main representatives Arvo PArt, John Tavener, and Giya Kancheli. In almost all respects, the musical principles of the new spiritual music seem to be diametrically opposed to those of modernism: repetition and rest versus development and progress, tradition and familiarity versus innovation and experiment, communication versus individualism and conceptualism, tonality versus atonality, and so on. As such, this movement is often considered as part of the much larger complex called postmodernism. Joining in with ideas on spirituality as presented by Michel de Certeau and Mark C. Taylor, Cobussen deconstructs the classification of the 'spiritual dimensions' of music as described above. Thresholds presents an idea of spirituality in and through music that counters strategies of exclusion and mastering of alterity and connects it to wandering, erring, and roving. Using the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, Jean-FranAois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and others, and analysing the music of John Coltrane, the mythical Sirens, Arvo PArt, and The Eagles (to mention a few), Cobussen regards spirituality as a (non)concept that escapes categorization, classification, and linguistic descriptions. Spirituality is a-topological, non-discursive and a manifestation of 'otherness'. And it is precisely music (or better: listening to music) that induces these thoughts: by carefully encountering, analysing, and evaluating certain examples from classical, jazz, pop and world music it is possible to detach spirituality from concepts of otherworldliness and transcendentalism. Thresholds opens a space in which spirituality can be connected to music that is not commonly considered in this light, thereby enriching the ways of approaching and discussing music. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to show that spirituality is not an attribute of music, not a simple adjective providing extra information or used to categorize certain types of music. Instead, the spiritual can happen through listening to music, in a more or less personalized relationship with it. This relationship might be characterized as susceptible instead of controlling, open instead of excluding, groping instead of rigid.

This book contains 50 easy piano arrangements of popular praise and worship songs that are sung in churches everywhere. The arrangements, by leading Christian music arranger Carol Tornquist, sound great both as piano solos and for sing-alongs. Complete lyrics are included along with basic chord symbols. Titles: 10,000 Reasons * Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) * Be the Centre * Beautiful One * Better Is One Day * Blessed Be Your Name * Blessings * Breathe * Come, Now Is the Time to Worship * Cry of My Heart * Draw Me Close * Everlasting God * Forever * Give Thanks * God of Wonders * Great Is the Lord * Hallelujah (Your Love Is Amazing) * He Knows My Name * The Heart of Worship * Here I Am to Worship * Holy, Holy, Holy * Holy Is the Lord * Hosanna (Praise Is Rising) * How Deep the Father's Love for Us * How Great Is Our God * I Could Sing of Your Love Forever * I Lift My Eyes Up (Psalm 121) * I Love You, Lord * In Christ Alone (My Hope Is Found) * In the Secret * Indescribable * Jesus Messiah * Lord I Lift Your Name on High * Lord Reign In Me * Majesty (Here I Am) * Mighty to Save * More Love, More Power * Open the Eyes of My Heart * Our God * Revelation Song * Shout to the Lord * Sing to the King * Take My Life (Holiness) * Untitled Hymn (Come to Jesus) * We Fall Down * The Wonderful Cross * You Are My All in All * You Are My King (Amazing Love) * Your Grace Is Enough * You're Worthy of My Praise.

In 1714, the 29 year-old Johann Sebastian Bach was promoted to the position of concertmaster at the ducal court of Weimar. This post required him for the first time in his already established career to produce a regular stream of church cantatas-one cantata every four weeks. Among the most significant works of this period is Ich hatte viel Bekummernis in meinem Herzen (Cantata 21). Generally known in English as "I had much affliction," Cantata 21 draws from several psalms and the Book of Revelations and offers a depiction of the spiritual ascent of the soul from intense tribulation to joy and exaltation. Although widely performed and loved by musicians, Cantata 21 has endured much criticism from scholars and critics who claim that the piece lacks organizational clarity and stylistic coherence. In Tears into Wine, renowned Bach scholar Eric Chafe challenges the scholarly consensus, arguing that Cantata 21 is an exceptionally carefully designed work, and that it displays a convergence of musical structure and theological purpose that is paradigmatic of Bach's sacred work as a whole. Drawing on a wide range of Lutheran theological writing, Chafe shows that Cantata 21 reaches beyond the scope of the individual liturgical occasion to voice a breadth of meaning that encompasses much of the core of Lutheran thought. Chafe artfully demonstrates that instead of simply presenting a musical depiction of the soul's journey from sorrow to bliss, Cantata 21 expresses the various stages of God's revelation and their impact on the believing soul. As a result, Chafe reveals that Cantata 21 has a formal design that mirrors Lutheran belief in unfolding revelation, with the final movement representing the work's "crown"-the goal toward which all of the earlier movements are directed. Complete with full text translations of the cantata and the liturgical readings that would have accompanied it at the first performance, Tears into Wine is a monumental book that is ideally suited for Bach scholars and students, as well as those generally interested in the relationship between theology and music.